As usual there was an immoderate amount of rubbish in the
budget debate in the Fourth State Duma. The vain efforts of Markov the
Second to trip up Kokovtsov, and the vain efforts of Kokovtsov “to charm
away” with words the feudal character of “our” policy and our budget,
and the vain efforts of the Cadets to assure a gullible public that
Kokovtsov “admitted it was the Cadets who had to be taken into
consideration” in the Fourth Duma—this was just a lot of tedious,
overworked and hypocritical rubbish.

There are, however, a few grains of truth in this rubbish heap. The
Markovs, Kokovtsovs and Shingaryovs tried to hide them deeper in it. But it
is worth while pulling them out.

“I have dealt at such length with the settlement of the
land question,” Kokovtsov exclaimed on May 13, “because in that question
is contained the whole solution of Russia’s future....”

It was not the “whole” solution and the “future” in general that
needed to be discussed, but the future of the June Third
system,[1] which gives all power to the “bureaucracy” and the feudal
landowners. Under the old rural organisation we cannot
retain power—that was what the landowners, taught by bitter experience,
had decided. In order to retain power they had to arrange in their own way
for the reorganisation of the old countryside on bourgeois lines. That is
the basis and the essence of “the land question”.

“... Whether the government will be able to do this,
whether it [the settlement of the land question] will bring the benefit the
government and the legislative institutions expect,” continued the
Minister, “the future will show....”

Of course, the future will reveal everything and show
everything. It will show the outcome of the efforts of
the feudals and the efforts of the proletariat that marches at the head of
the democrats. But the figures given by the “serious” (by Cadet
standards) Mr. Kokovtsov show absolutely nothing. The number of
applications for land is rapidly increasing—and Mr. Kokovtsov is
enraptured, the Rights in the Duma are enraptured. The number of
applications was: in 1907—221,000; in 1908—385,000; in 1909—711,000;
in 1910—651,000; in 1911—683,000; in 1912—1,183,000; total 3,834,000.

Such are the Minister’s “proofs” and his material for judging the
future.

On that very same May 13 the government newspaper
Novoye Vremya published data for the house-to-house Zemstvo census
taken in 1911 in Samara Uyezd. The number of households obtaining titles to
land amounted in that uyezd to forty per cent, that is, higher than the
average for Russia. This uyezd, therefore, is most “favourable” for the
government.

And how did it turn out? Of the total number obtaining titles to land
less than three out of a hundred (2.9 per cent) own real, separate
farmsteads; only, one-sixteenth (6.5 per cent) own their land in one piece
and more than nine-tenths (90.6 per cent) have land in strips in
different places!

Nine-tenths of the title-holding peasants farm strips that are isolated
from each other, just as they did before. Farming conditions are even
worse than before because formerly the commune could
“correct” the strip system to some extent by frequent redistributions.

In a mere four years a third of the land transferred to the
title-holders has already passed into other hands. Loss of land is
increasing, impoverishment is increasing still more rapidly and there is
growing confusion because of the strips of land. Unbelievable poverty is
increasing in the villages, as is the number of famines. The number of
landless peasants, pure proletarians, is increasing. The number of
impoverished “would-be proprietors” is increasing; they are
trapped both by the old bondage and by the system
of allotting scattered strips of land that has resulted from the notorious
landowners’ solution to the land problem.

Apparently this bondage will not be abolished by the
landowners’ solution to the peasant land problem. It can
only be cured if the land question is settled on broad democratic lines.

Notes

[1]The June Third Law
marked the beginning of the period known as the “Stolypin reaction” (also
the June Third system).